Software-defined hyper-cellular architecture for green and elastic wireless access

LANGUAGE

English

SOURCE

IEEE Communications Magazine

Published

Date:2016

ABSTRACT

To meet the surging demand of increasing mobile Internet traffic from diverse applications while maintaining moderate energy cost, the radio access network of cellular systems needs to take a green path into the future, and the key lies in providing elastic service to dynamic traffic demands. To achieve this, it is time to rethink RAN architectures and expect breakthroughs. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art literature, which aims to renovate RANs from the perspectives of control- traffic decoupled air interface, cloud-based RANs, and software-defined RANs. We then propose a software-defined hyper-cellular architecture (SDHCA) that identifies a feasible way to integrate the above three trends to enable green and elastic wireless access. We further present key enabling technologies to realize SDHCA, including separation of the air interface, green base station operations, and base station functions virtualization, followed by our hardware testbed for SDHCA. In addition, we summarize several future research issues worth investigating.